Good morning from Retail Media Age HQ,
I’m back in the newsletter-writing seat after a jam-packed run of events these past two weeks – most recently the IAB Europe’s Retail Media Impact Summit, which I was fortunate enough to attend in Amsterdam on Tuesday and Wednesday, and which was a fantastic opportunity to reconnect with great people from across the industry.
I moderated an afternoon breakout session, ‘Beyond Awareness: Unlocking Retail Media Performance with Shoppable Ads’, with speakers Julien Mateos at Equativ and Anais Constans at Retailink by Fnac Darty. The session provided a really interesting look at a retail media case study targeting the top and middle of the funnel – areas that are not always considered retail media’s strengths, but which it is increasingly well-positioned to address.
The subject of retail media’s full-funnel future then came up in the following session, ‘From Data to Decisions: The Pan-European Retail Media Maturity Check’, a fascinating panel featuring speakers from LiveRamp, AH Retail Media Services, Rewe Group, and the Dunnhumby Network Alliance.
AH Retail Media Services’ Max de Jong predicted that retail media would be seeing “full-funnel results with measurement in place as well” in two years’ time, while Rewe Group’s Christian Raveaux added that CTV would be increasingly underpinned by retail media data and LiveRamp’s Stanislas Lajouanie predicted greater scale across offsite channels like CTV, social media, and DOOH.
In the same session, an audience question gave rise to a lively debate about whether and how retail media can truly compete with the ‘big three’ of Amazon, Google, and Meta, with one audience member arguing that retailers should protect their most advantageous asset, their in-store transactional data, at all costs rather than giving it up to the walled gardens.
Raveaux responded that while it is a “selective risk” for retailers to work with walled gardens like the ‘big three’, what matters is that “it’s sensible for brands to buy into [the retail media proposition] and have a full-funnel experience that they can only buy with me.”
He agreed that “doubling down” on a retailer’s in-store proposition is important but emphasised the need to cover the full funnel in order for retail media to avoid being viewed as simply performance marketing.
Dunnhumby Network Alliance’s Andrew Connell also made a robust argument for retail media network collaboration during the Q&A, saying, “We have an opportunity right now to either quickly mature as an industry and set some standards and fight and put retail at the centre to create an alternative together – or smaller retailers are going to get picked off.”
For more thoughts on the move to create more standardisation in retail media, you can read my previous newsletter column on Retail Media Age.
